“About six months.”
Six months!... If they had said six years, Dunoisse would have believed them. Could it be possible that such slow, interminable agonies as he had drunk of, such painful resignation as he had fought for and won, had been packed into so short a space of time as half-a-year? He asked for a mirror he had been denied—and they brought him one. He looked in it, and saw a face bleached to the tint of reddish ivory, framed in white hair that fell in waving locks almost to the shoulders. The long straggling mustache and beard were of white with streaks of blackness. From the deep caves under the arched black eyebrows the bright black eyes of Hector Dunoisse looked back at him. But they looked with a gentleness that was new. And the smile that hovered about the sharply-modeled lips had in it a sorrowful, patient sweetness that the smile of Dunoisse had never had previously. It was partly this change that had caused the Commandant to report the prisoner as insane.
Dunoisse’s watch and chain, with his penknife, pencil-case, and razors were now restored to him, with his clothes and a portion of the considerable sum of money that had been taken from him at the time of his arrest. A military barber of the garrison trimmed his hair and reduced the mustache and beard to more conventional proportions. Attired in a well-worn suit of gray traveling clothes, hanging in folds upon his stooping emaciated figure, you saw the late prisoner take leave of the Commandant and step into a closed carriage that was waiting in the courtyard, with an officer of police in plain clothes seated by the driver on the box. When the carriage rumbled out under the great square gate-tower erected in the fifteenth century by the Count of St. Pol, the man inside had an access of nervous trembling. He shut his eyes, and presently the shadow passed, and he could look upon the free, fair world again.
It was the end of October; the gaunt poplars had shed their yellowed leaves, and the haws were scarlet on the bushes. Mists hung over the marshes—the odor of decaying vegetation came to Dunoisse with each free breath he drew.
He could no longer judge of time, and the watch they had returned to him had not been wound up. It seemed to him a drive of many hours before the carriage stopped. He was told to get out, and obeyed. He found himself in a graveled enclosure outside a railway-station. His meager baggage was deposited. The carriage was driven away. It was so marvelous to have a porter come and pick up his battered valise and light portmanteau, and so overwhelming to be asked where the latter was to be labeled for, that Dunoisse, standing on the Paris departure platform, could only stare at the interrogative porter, and answer after a bewildered silence:
“I really do not know!”
He knew a few moments later. For a gray-painted express rushed, with a winnowing and fanning as of giant wings, through the station. The train was full of English soldiers, their unbuttoned coats testifying to the heat of the closely-packed compartments. Their fresh-colored faces crowded at the windows; they left behind with their cheers and fag-ends of comic songs an impression of rude health and pathetic ignorance, above all, of extreme youth.
Dunoisse, unnerved by captivity, rendered dizzy by the sudden shock of revelation, reeled back and collided with a person who stood behind him, and proved to be a humpbacked, withered little old man, in charge of the station newspaper-stall. The little old man—who wore a black velvet cap, and had a ginger-colored chin-tuft, and spoke French with a curious hissing accent—received his apologies with a smiling air.